Grace tightened her grip on her bag and nodded.
“Two fields burned, Grace, and a man dead. Be careful. Come home to us safely.”
“Sure. Will do. Easy. As soon as I find where that is.”
Jeanne put down her needle and held open her arms. “Come here, sweet girl.”
Grace went to her and knelt, the embrace clumsy. Jeanne’s skin smelled leathery and rich.
She stayed that way, her head cradled in Jeanne’s arms, a long time.
Grace got caught in truck traffic heading north on the 15. She had a low-grade headache that carried her past the brown and yellow scrub of Camp Pendleton, the blackened burn area from the Indio fire through the checkpoint as officers glanced into cars looking for illegals, and on past the auto dealerships and neat rows of identical condos stitched together with soft red roofs.
She passed a nursery with palm trees on a brown stony hillside, trunks cut so that they looked like rows of crosses. She stopped at a roadside stand in the heat and bought organic cherries and then found she couldn’t eat them. The heat bled the juice onto the paper bag like spatter at a crime scene. She put the bag in the trunk, changed her mind, and tossed it in the trash.
She reminded herself that Guatemala had happened a long time ago. Before Katie was born and she was five now. What had happened there had been serious enough that she’d quit medicine and taken a job in the San Diego Police crime lab, working with fluids and not people. She’d stopped the drinking and reached the point where she could work crime scenes, handle spatters, dead bodies, compartmentalize. But since the kidnapping, the fragile boundary between reality and nightmare was porous again, and it took all her energy staying in the moment. Not going back. She wasn’t ready to see a dead body.
She pulled in to a rest stop when she got to Highway 215. She had a fresh shirt in her suitcase and she put it on over her tank top. A row of hang gliders floated high inland as she took the Perris exit. They hovered against the sky like a band of delicate, mutant butterflies.
She pulled into the parking lot next to the sand-colored coroner’s office and parked. She turned off the ignition and immediately the air in the car grew suffocating.
Her nostrils felt pinched. She took little sips of air, as if she were rationing it, delaying going in, and finally burst out the door in a damp gulping rush, hurrying down the white bleached path to the sliding front door.
Deputy Coroner Jeff Salzer met her at the front desk and led her through a work space of laminated counters and computer stations. His hair was starting to thin. He carried himself like a retired military man, shoulders back, as if tensing for a bullet that hadn’t been fired yet.
Air-conditioning blasted. A chunky deputy in rolled-up sleeves glanced up from her notepad as they went by in silence.
Salzer closed the door and motioned for her to sit. Through the window, her car already looked glossy with heat, as if the chrome were melting. She took the seat across from his desk.
“Special Agent Descanso said to give you whatever you need on this one.”
His desk was swept clean except for his computer. It was on, the screen blank.
“I thought the body would have gone to the Indio morgue; that’s closest to Palm Springs.”
“Would have, but the air-conditioning in Indio blew out in this heat. We’ve gotten all of them for a week now. They come in refrigerated trucks. Full house. Let me get the file.”
Salzer pushed away from his desk and his pecs bunched under his shirt. He riffled through a file drawer. Grace tried not to visualize what full house looked like in a morgue.
He pulled out a thick file and handed it to her. “You can use the conference room. You can’t make copies, but you can take whatever notes you’d like.”
She nodded and followed him into the corridor. She caught the faint whiff of formaldehyde. Her stomach churned and she tasted acid.
“Palm Springs is a real dog’s breakfast right now with that ag convention. Where’s your hotel?”
“Right off Palm Canyon.”
“You’re going to get a dose of it then. They start at the Convention Center and spill out onto the main drag.”
“I heard a second field was torched. Anybody else killed?”
A deputy rolled a rack of files down the hall and squeezed past them. Salzer shook his head and resumed walking.
“No, but a couple of delegates were hospitalized for smoke inhalation. It’s going to get nastier. Protest organizers took out a march permit for eight thousand people. They’ve blown right through that number. We expect ten times that amount. The last time the U.S. hosted this conference was in Sacramento. Major protests. That came on the heels of riots in Seattle during the World Trade Organization, which led to looting and the declaration of martial law. You know how many rioters showed up for that one?”
Grace shook her head.
“Close to a hundred thousand, Grace. We have two hundred cops, security guards, and a handful of National Guardsmen piled in, from as far away as L.A. The FBI’s running the show. Not bad, but it’s not good, either. Makes everybody nervous. Plus, we got people drinking, raising hell, so we’ve had a rash of unrelated accidents, car crashes, partygoers using loaded weapons. A mess here. We’ve got three autopsies backed up. I can rustle up coffee, water, maybe some soda.”
“Water’s good.”
He nodded and closed the door. She took a seat at the long table in the quiet room. Empty bulletin boards with tacks adorned the walls. A detailed map of the Coachella Valley hung over a coffeemaker. The coffee smelled burned.
She opened the file. Stapled to the cover page was Bartholomew’s DMV photo. A heavyset man in his sixties stared back, with beetling eyebrows and shrewd blue eyes, looking into the camera with a mixture of intelligence and amusement, as if he was party to some small secret.
He was wearing a blue oxford button-down shirt, open at the neck, and a tweed jacket. His silvery hair was long, parted in the middle, his face a series of pouches: fleshy jowls, pink balloons of cheeks, and smaller, bluish bulges under his eyes. He looked impatient and tired, a combination Grace remembered from the day he’d burst into the lecture hall in Indio, not far from where she was sitting right now.
That day he was yelling, waving a sign and pointing a camera like a weapon:
DOWN WITH RACIAL PROFILING. POLICE PIGS ARE WHITE SUPREMACISTS.
He’d been cuffed and hustled out, and as they’d closed the door and she’d resumed her lecture, she’d heard him screaming, “Sow it, you’ll reap it!”
From Martin Luther King’s 1967 speech, taken from the Bible. Grace was just Catholic enough to have felt immediately guilty.
She’d never seen him again. Palm Springs police had taken her statement, but they hadn’t needed her to testify: He’d pled guilty and spent three days in jail for disturbing the peace. A month ago. And now he was dead.
She turned back to the file and studied the crime scene photos. Bartholomew had been reduced to looking like a charred piece of meat, the arrow still embedded in his chest.
She’d seen plenty of crime scene photos. She could get through these.
She looked up as the door opened and Salzer came in with a bottle of water.
“Thanks.”
He nodded